The 2015 NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed on Sunday night, which means the most exciting few weeks in sports are upon us. It also means we can use the basketball bracket as an excuse to explore other, non-athletic, but still incredibly important, tournaments.

Enter The Most ’90s Band Ever Tournament.

Now, to be clear, we are not here to establish the best music of the 90s. So there’s no truly great musicians, like Nirvana* or Biggie or Weezer or Tupac in this tournament. We are also not here to recognize musicians whose careers flourished in the 90s, but continue to be influential today. So there’s no Radiohead or Jay-Z or Foo Fighters or Wu-Tang Clan.

The objective here is to determine the MOST 90s group or artist. Those acts that typify everything about the decade, both musically and culturally, for better or (mostly) worse.

(*Although we did include Temple of the Dog, as to not entirely ignore the Seattle Movement.)

With that, let us begin the voting! Below you’ll find polls for every first round match-up. Voting for this round will go from Monday, March 16 through Wednesday, March 18. The round of 32 will appear in a separate post, which will be live on Thursday morning.

It’s Ace Of Base. They were immediate pop smashes with a throwback vibe to ABBA. 1970s nostalgia was in full swing and Ace Of Base became well-known culturally. Sugar Ray didn’t gain attention for anything but their album cover until “Fly” in ’97. Their biggest album came out in 1999. There’s nothing that particularly screams ’90s’ about them other than the cover to Lemonade And Brownies.

My methodology changes based on the genre. For instance, if it’s rock, I vote based on how much the lead singer looks like the older brother from Boy Meets World. If it’s rap, I vote based on how often they wear overalls or an all white sweatsuit.

They are the perfect example of grunge in every way, from the metal side to the emotional caterwauling bits. Flannel, leather, dirty boots and the whole nine.

Yet, despite signifying the entire grunge movement from it’s Mother Love Bone host to the many seedlings planted from within, it’s losing out to a band I’ve already forgotten the name of and I just wen back and looked.

It’s gonna be hard to find a more ’90s act than this unless it’s Puff Daddy, and it’s not even going to make it out of the first round.

@immaviking: 311 is still out there touring with the mindset that it is still 1995. I’m certainly not going to knock them, because they have made a lot of money for a band that used to play house parties in Lincoln, NE. I was a huge fan of 311 back in the 90’s and would have defended them to the death back in the day, so for me 311 is my pick here.

I like your submission for Reel Big Fish, but against Blink 182 it is a mismatch. The tournament is all about match ups, and Blink 182 has more reach among those who caught the tail end of the 90’s and heard their bland form of punk in all of the American Pie movies. Now, if you were to have Reel Big Fish matched up against The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, then we have the makings of a barn burner, my friend.

@Don Confidence @Remo Williams: Maybe the authors chose to leave them out on purpose, but it just dawned on me that one of the most 90’s bands is missing…The Goo Goo Dolls. I would really like the committee to answer for that injustice! At the very least, Goo should have been on that 7 line where Smashing Pumpkins now sits.

In high school my buddy won tickets on the radio to see MB20 at a high school auditorium about an hour away from us. He didn’t have his license yet so I drove us there and we ended up hanging out with them for about 30 minutes backstage after the show. Real nice guys that hadn’t had a bit of success yet. I’ve been a secret fan ever since. Side note, the headlights went out on my piece of shit car on the way home and my dad had to come pick us up on the side of the freeway.

@Remo Williams: Really? Oasis is one of the first band I think of when they do a 90’s at noon list on the radio. How many fuc*king times did we really need to hear Wonderwall during that time decade???

@Palin Givens oh I hear you, but let’s not forget that A) Radio stations might get shut down if they didn’t play something off of Sixteen Stone at least three times every hour and B) The popularity of the music isn’t important so much as how much the band defined, or was defined by the era. Bush led the charge of bands that piggy-backed off of the grunge sound and ushered in bands like Creed. So by my logic, which I deem flawless, Bush is responsible for Creed, making them the truest 90’s band in this bracket.

Where did you get the ya hoos that made this bracket up? How the hell do you put DMX against TLC? That alone makes this whole bracket crap. Not to mention all the bands that are missing. Were the writers around during the 90s????

@WTFkid: That sounds like a dreadful evening, and might be a little hard to top. I do have another rather entertaining 90’s concert story, if you will indulge me for a moment.

The year was 1997, and young Palin was just finishing his first year in college. I was attending the local JC, and still living in my parents attic because I was paying for college myself and only had two low paying crappy jobs. I still had a waterbed that my parents bought for me when I was eleven, and just never got around to replacing it before entering college. The waterbed started to become a real nuisance as I would come home from parties absolutely bombed.

On the day that my friends and I were to attend a 311 show in KC, I asked a few guys to show up at my house early so we could remove the waterbed from the attic. One guy showed up and things were going swimmingly, (pun intended-as you will see in a moment) until we got to the last little bit of water that would not drain out. We tried everything we could thing of to get it out, but we were outsmarted by the watery-coffin. It was my great idea to pick the mattress up and throw it out the window. This would end up as one of the dumbest suggestions young Palin ever thought up.

As my friend and I picked up the mattress the water kept shifting from side to side and we could not get a good grip on it to heave it out the window. The next thing I know my friend says “I’m losing my grip” and then the mattress fell to the floor spilling a couple of gallons onto the floor. Water rushed into my entertainment center literally frying my Nintendo and some games and VHS tapes. We quickly grabbed what was left and did a barrel roll out of the window and finally the beast was defeated. Now, I pointed out that I lived in the attic, so what came next was a real panic inducing moment. As we walked downstairs to leave for the 311 concert, (you have probably forgotten what the hell started all of this) I heard water dripping from somewhere. The water had started dripping from the ceiling through the chandelier, and onto my fathers wooded kitchen table. What was I to do? After all, I had a 311 concert that I needed to leave for if we were going to have time to party before the opening act. Always the quick thinker, I grabbed a 5 gallon bucket to put under the leak. I then wrote a note explaining what happened and where I had run off to. Needless to say, when I sobered up the next morning and realized what I had done, I didn’t return home for about three days. As you can imagine, my father was furious. He said “I hope that concert was worth it!” Actually it was, because 311 was touring with Fishbone at that time, and they were off the chart.

Moral of the story kids, always put your Nintendo up high when attempting to throw your waterbed out of the top floor of the house.

The winner should be a band that represents the 90s sound, look, etc. Not a band that had a hit in the 90s but it was just timing or a band that was big in the 90s but whose songs are pretty timeless or whose success has spanned many decades.

I *still* listen to Boyz II Men in 2015 because they’re great. But that’s why I couldn’t in good conscience vote for them in this tournament. No way are they more 90s than the talk-rap oversized suit wearing Ma$e. I mean

Terrible, terrible bracket and methodology. The four biggest 90’s bands/acts (and by being the biggest, they are the acts that defined the decade) are in no particular order Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Tupac, and Biggie. Not to mention a lot of other huge 90’s bands. Nine Inch Nails? Snoop? Dr. Dre? Then you include Good Charlotte and Blink 182, but not Green Day? Seriously? Was Good Charlotte even a thing in the 90’s?

I declare a mistrial. 90s Ska deserves a region. Less Than Jake, Big D, Might Might Boston’s, Suburban Legends, and Reel Big Fish at least. Hell, LTJ did the theme for Good Burger and RBF was in BASEketball.

There is no reason why Nirvana should be left off of this lest. It does not make any since. Nirvana not only made grunge a thing they were the top. They were flannels before flannels were cool. There music was better and there style was better. They did not create any music after the 90’s. Good Charlotte is nothing in the 90’s. they were part of the emo punk cry baby tour of the early 2000’s i replaced them with nirvana and have Nirvana running a way with it. There were more nirvana stickers on cars in the 90’s then any other band on this lest.

No. Cause you worked at a corporate record store full of bubblegum and daydreams. You sold out like Carson Daly, so don’t presume you have any more insight than the guy who worked the counter across the way at Orange Julius.

It was a corporate chain, but at least it was a Canadian corporation! And in Canada Carson Daly is almost completely unknown, believe it or not. MTV wasn’t widely available. We had Much Music. So we missed TRL and everything.